Safety is Our Number One Priority
by roisaber
Summary: Jebediah, Bill, and Bob get completely hammered the night before the first manned orbital flight, and get the brilliant idea to hijack the launch vehicle and go up early. Rocket science is tricky work, drunk.


Bob, Bill, and Jebediah were all completely shitfaced. It was against protocol, of course, but as long as they showed up relatively coherent the next morning the three were sure they could get away with it. The crowds at the bar had slowly drifted out, leaving the three Kerbalnauts alone with all but the most hardened drunks and a bartender that was watching the clock so he could kick them all out right on the dot at 0200 hours. Bill carefully aimed his dart. He was seeing double, so he had two targets to choose from.

"I can't… I can't believe we're finally doing it," Bob slurred. "After all the testing, all the training, all the explosions… _all_ the explosions… we're finally going to space tomorrow."

"Yeah, man." Jebediah suddenly threw his arms around the other Kerbal, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "I love you, man!"

"I love you too."

Bill threw his dart, and against all conceivable odds hit both of the boards right in the bulls-eye.

"Do you think they'll know we're hungover tomorrow?" Bob asked.

Jebediah shook his head vigorously. "We won't get a hangover. We're drinking vodka, and since vodka is made with science, it's impossible for it to make us hungover."

Bob looked dubious. "I've been hungover from vodka before."

"Couldn't be," Jebediah insisted. "It must have been… uh… fake vodka."

Bill went over to the boards to remove his darts and almost fell over. He steadied himself on the weight of the metal shaft alone.

"First Kerbaled orbital flight," he said, and then hiccuped.

It was true. Kerbals were a one-gendered race that reproduced by creating cloned polyps. Since there were no genders, there were no penises, and without penis there was nothing to motivate the species into war and self-destructive arms races. The Kerbals was able to put a vast amount of resources towards its space project since it didn't have to waste them on violence and threats of nuclear war. Still, progress was slow. The first unmanned orbital shot blew up on the pad. The second one blew up on the pad. The third one blew up on the pad. The fourth one blew up on the pad. The fifth one managed to get a couple hundred feet into the air before it spun out of control, flung a booster, and then blew up right before impacting with the ground. After years of failure, the Kerbals' first satellite, Kerbuntnik, finally achieved orbit. Engineers were certain that a modified launch vehicle based on its design could carry three Kerbals safely into orbit and maybe even back.

"Do you think there's other intelligent life out there?" Bob asked dreamily.

"Of course," Bill insisted. "The universe is way too big for there not to be other… other… other those things! Species!"

Jebediah said, "Fuck that shit. Is there even intelligent life here? You all remember what happened to - "

"Don't say it!" Bill interrupted.

" – the first crew," Jebediah finished.

A somber mood overtook the three. The primary flight crew had been missing for 487 days and counting. It was widely believed that they must be dead; even if they slowed their metabolism to hibernation mode, there was no way a Kerbal could live that long without food and water. But conspiracy theories remained. Perhaps they'd been locked up in the food storage warehouse, where 10 years of freeze dried ick sat and waited to be used to supply space missions. Perhaps they'd been sucked into a dimensional vortex opened by the theoretical physics boys down in the lab. Maybe the three had just gotten scared and fled. Whatever had happened to the three, it was widely known to be bad luck to bring up the unfortunate disappearance.

"Damn it!" Bill said furiously. "You know it's bad luck to bring up the unfortunate disappearance!"

"Let's just focus on the mission," Bob cut in.

"Okay, polyps, it's time for me to close up and you all to go the fuck home," the bartender announced to the disappointed groans of the drunks at the bar.

Bob, Bill, and Jebediah stumbled out of the bar into the picturesque town of Rocketport. The town had been built from the ground up to serve the needs of the Kerbal Space Center, and in the ten years of its existence it had attracted the both finest minds and the most desperate criminals - who were often the same people. The town was located right on the ocean twenty miles north of the space center. Everything was new and freshly painted and little flags waved in the breeze, illuminated by the white LED street lights. Bob leaned into one of the lamp polls, doubled over, and vomited on his own shoes. Suddenly, Jebediah got an evil gleam in his eyes.

"Let's go to the Space Center and take the Celestia 1 up right now," he suggested.

Bob was just drunk enough to think this was a good idea.

"Hell yeah!" he cried. "Let's do it!"

"Are you guys crazy!?" Bill demanded.

"As Flight Commander, I order you that we're going," Jebediah said, right before adding his vomit to the puddle beneath Bob's feet.

"We're drunk!" Bill groaned.

"That's exactly why now is the perfect time to go. Our bodies will be slacker, better able to handle the gees," Bob offered.

"The man is right!" Jebediah said, slapping him on the shoulders. "Let's go to KSC right now."

So, the three piled into Jebediah's car. As always, he insisted on driving, though he could barely see straight. Fortunately there was very little traffic at that early hour and Rocketport had a rudimentary-at-best police force. Jebediah thundered down the road at speeds well in excess of the speed limit, sometimes reaching speeds of up to 40 meters per second relative to Kerbin. Bill moaned and hung onto the handrail on the ceiling of the vehicle for dear life. Bob punctuated his shouts of joy with vomit; he occasionally leaned out of the car's open window and puked down the side of the vehicle. The road had long, gentle curves, and Jebediah was able to navigate it more-or-less safely even though he was incredibly drunk. The guard at the gate waved them through without taking a second look, and then, they were on the KSC campus.

"It's beautiful," Bob murmured, looking up at the giant rocket.

It was. Floodlights illuminated the great craft, pointed at the sky like a long grey dart. It was held to the launch tower with a series of explosive bolts. Jebediah carelessly maneuvered the car around until it was right at the base of the tower, and the three Kerbalnauts piled out and stared up at the pinnacle of Kerbal engineering.

"We can still change our minds," Bill suggested nervously.

"We're going up now! That's an order!" Jebediah insisted.

So, the three suited up at the base of the tower. There was no one around and they had a great deal of trouble fumbling with the many catches and latches of the space suits. They were still completely hammered, and Bob blew chunks once again, all down the front of his space suit. Bill and Jebediah refused to change him and so the three ascended the elevator covered in glory as well as upchuck.

"That's strange," Thaddeus said in Mission Control. "It looks like somebody opened the Celestia's hatch. Hey, Percival, is somebody up on the launch tower?"

There was only a skeleton crew of three Kerbals keeping idle watch on the boards at Mission Control, and Percival sauntered over to take a look at Thaddeus' board.

"That _is_ strange," Percival allowed. "It's probably just a computer malfunction. Somebody get the Flight Chief out of bed… I'd hate to have the mission delayed because of the computers."

"Hey, boss!" Cornelius called out.

Percival gave him the stinkeye. "What?"

"It looks like somebody's starting the preflight routines!" Cornelius said with an inflection of rising panic.

"That's impossible!" Percival hissed. "There's nobody _up_ there, is there?"

Thaddeus objected, "How could there be? It's gotta be the computers."

"Damn it! I'm calling Mac Daddy, somebody needs to fix these boards ASAP," Percival said.

Percival didn't relish the prospect of getting the big boss, the mac daddy, the rocket rocker Charlesworth out of bed, but the night shift commander didn't think he had much of a choice. If the mission was going to launch the next day at noon they needed all the heft they could get on the scene.

"What is it, Percival?" Charlesworth growled after the sixth ring. "Is there another cat loose on the campus?"

Percival stammered, "N-no, sir. But there's something strange happening on the boards. It's impossible, but it almost looks like somebody's trying to _steal_ the Celestia."

"My God, Kerbal. Are you drunk?" Charlesworth demanded furiously.

"No sir! It's probably just a computer malfunction, but somebody needs to get down here and check the wiring."

Aboard the Celestia 1, Bill, Bob, and Jebediah were going through the pre-flight checks. Light after light lit up green, to the immense satisfaction of the Flight Commander. Bob secured the hatch while Bill strapped himself so tightly into his seat that he could barely breathe. Hot, manly tears of bravery were rolling down Bill's cheek.

"We can still stop, you guys," Bill said insistently. "They probably won't even execute us."

"Too late to turn back now," Jebediah said, swallowing a dry heave.

"O2 is nominal, gyros are gyroscopic, stabilizers are stable," Bob announced.

"Arm the bolts."

Putting the staging controls in the launch vehicle itself was probably a bad idea, in retrospect.

"Bolts armed," Bob said, while Bill openly sobbed.

"Press fuel tanks open."

"Fuel tanks open."

"How's the LOX mixture looking?" Jebediah asked.

"Looks good, boss."

Back in Mission Control, the three Kerbals manning the skeleton crew were in open panic.

"That's not the boards, sir!" Thaddeus cried. "That rocket is definitely mixing its fuel."

Percival stared incredulously out of the window. The engines for the great, precision-engineered machine were starting to smoke. He couldn't believe what he was seeing, and his brain blindly searched years and years of training and protocol for how to handle someone _hijacking_ the rocket. They'd run a thousand simulations but that was one possibility they'd never even remotely considered.

"Fuck!" Percival boldly announced.

"What do we do?" Cornelius asked nervously.

Finally, Percival came to a useful conclusion.

"I'll be damned if we lose this launch on my watch," Percival shouted. "Cornelius, Thaddeus, get to the boards. I don't know who's on Celestia but we're taking them up come Hell or high water!"

Inside the cockpit, the high water mostly consisted of vomit. The cabin smelled like vomit, booze, and Kerbal sweat.

"Celestia, this is Mission Control. Please acknowledge, over."

Bob, feeling mischievous, opened the channel.

"Roger this is Celestia, over."

"Who the fuck do you think you are!?" Percival demanded angrily.

"We're the Caped Crusaders of Space, over," Bob replied.

"Damn it! Get out of that rocket right now!"

"Hydraulic external power to on," Jebediah ordered.

"On, sir."

"You're going to ruin millions of Kerbols worth of equipment," Percival groaned. "Not to mention getting yourselves all killed. Over."

"Fuck that, Rocketport. We're heading to _spaaaaaace_," Bob said.

"How do the boards look on your end, Rocketport? Over."

"Like there's a bunch of idiots trying to steal a spacecraft, over," Percival replied acidly.

"We're good to go, sir," Bob said.

Percival vowed, "If you somehow survive this you're going to jail _forever_."

"T minus ten, nine, eight, seven…" Jebediah counted down.

Too enthusiastic to wait for zero, and wanting to keep Mission Control on its toes, Jebediah jabbed the big red button at t-minus three seconds. Explosive bolts tore off the side of the ship while its boosters and Mainsail engine engaged, and the three Kerbalnauts were pressed into the back of their chairs by the building gees as the rocket started climbing up from the planet.

"We're away!" Bob shouted, overcome with joy.

Bill was still crying, but not with joy.

Jebediah watched the altimeter through his drunken haze. They were steadily climbing and building up speed, and now they were a full kilometer away from the surface of the planet. SAS was holding the ship steady, and he glanced at the fuel mixtures through the rattling of the cockpit. Percival simply watched the rocket, unable to believe his eyes.

"I can't believe those crazy sons-of-bitches did it," he breathed aloud. "Thaddeus, what's their speed?"

"Up to a hundred meters per second, sir."

"How long until Q?"

Thaddeus checked the controls.

"Air's a little thick today, sir. I'd say two minutes."

Percival picked up the radio. "Two minutes to Q, Celestia. I hope to Hell you know what that means."

The cockpit was filled with the roar of the engines, and they rattled around in their seats from the jostling engines. The gimbals and fins were holding them roughly steady, and they were accelerating away from the surface of the planet at an ever-increasing speed. Bill stopped crying for just long enough to vomit, which sent the other three into a self-reinforcing cycle of puking and dry heaving. Fortuitously, the boosters ran out of fuel at around the time they reached Q, providing them with the slight loss in velocity that allowed them to get through the thickest patch of air pressure. Still, the ship held. Jebediah blew the explosive couplings that held the booster to the rest of the ship, and they spiraled downward into the ocean that was now kilometers below.

"They did it perfectly, sir," Thaddeus said with a hint of awe.

Percival just stared out the window at the rapidly receding rocket, filled with conflicting emotions.

He'd trained for this scenario hundreds of time, and Jebediah relied on muscle memory as much as anything to keep them on a steady trajectory.

"Seven clicks," Bob said.

"Okay, we'll be doing our pitch in fifteen seconds," Jebediah announced.

They'd reached over two hundred meters per second and Celestia 1 was performing beautifully. When they reached 10,000 meters, Jebediah carefully eased the stick over along the 90 degree axis, giving them the tilt that would allow the Kerbin itself to do some of the lifting work for them. It was a tense moment, or would have been if they weren't so trashed. As it was, the cockpit was filled with a celebratory atmosphere, while the three crewmen at KSC were filled with dread.

"They rolled, sir," Cornelius announced. "Good trajectory."

"Who the Hell are these guys!?" Percival demanded.

Cornelius shook his head, just as confused as anyone else. "The best Kerbin has to offer, sir."

Stage 1 was almost empty, and Jebediah held his finger over the staging button that would decouple the next stage from the lower fuel tank. Suddenly, the three Kerbalnauts were jerked forward as the engine flamed out, causing Jebediah to involuntarily jam his finger into the staging button. The ship rocked with the vibrations of an explosion as the bottom half was blown free and the Stage 2 engines kicked in. Bob puked again, this time managing to get some of the chunky, boozy semisolid down the front of his own spacesuit. If you really wanted, you probably could get drunk off his vomit alone.

"Keep pitching, slowly, over," Thaddeus announced over the radio.

The Stage 2 engines roared as Celestia 1 pushed its way through thinner atmosphere. Freed of the lower stages, the seven engines of stage two were rapidly increasing the velocity of the craft relative to the surface of the planet. They were already up to seven hundred meters per second, around a third of what they'd need to maintain an orbital trajectory. Jebediah was gleeful, Bill was terrified, and Bob was just drunk.

"They're still ascending, boss," Thaddeus announced. "Good trajectory."

"What's their altitude?" Percival asked.

"Thirty five klicks."

"Incredible. No ordinary Kerbal could have done this."

Without waiting for instructions from Mission Control, Jebediah pitched further, slowing the speed of the ascent of Celestia's apoapsis. Still, for the first time since they'd launched, he felt a little uncertain.

"What's my apoapsis, control, over?" he asked over the radio.

Thaddeus slid over and checked the unmanned board.

"Forty six thousand meters. Pitch up a bit, over."

Jebediah obediently brought the ship's bow a little further up along the ninety degree axis.

"Okay, you're good. What's your stage two fuel situation, over?" Thaddeus asked.

Jebediah checked the gauge. It was difficult to read with all of the rattling around in the middle atmosphere, combined with his extreme intoxication. Nevertheless, he was feeling happy-go-lucky once again.

"Almost burned. Stage three in thirty seconds, over."

Thaddeus checked his watch, and then the trajectory board. The flight crew had been less than perfectly efficient with their fuel, but they still had enough to attain orbit and then slow enough to return to the surface of Kerbin. The engineers had done a good job of including a little extra umph just in case everything didn't go as planned.

"You're good. When you hit sixty, pitch all the way into prograde and we'll fix your perapsis in a few minutes, over."

"Roger that."

They were high enough now that the atmosphere was little concern, and things were beginning to get awfully floaty inside the cockpit. With a groan, Bill realized that the cabin would be full of stray floating puke bits, and he didn't look forward to the zero gee pheneomenon. The stage 2 engines flamed out, and Jebediah quickly engaged stage 3 before they could lose too much velocity. They were slammed back against their chairs a third time as the final rocket, the one that would take them to and from orbit, burst to life.

"They got it, sir," Cornelius said. "Stage 3 engaged."

Bill looked out of the window and immediately regretted it. The planet was now noticeably circular, and it looked like a precious gemstone threaded with gold. They were high enough now to catch sight of the terminator line, and the beginning of dawn.

"Pitch down, Celestia," Thaddeus instructed. "You've got your apoapsis at seventy six thousand, over."

Cornelius was excited. "Sir, they're at nineteen hundred meters a second! They're going to make it! They're going to achieve orbit!"

As Bill had predicted, stray chunks of puke were now ascending into air due to the low gravity, and were interfering with their view. It was like trying to look at the control boards through a constellation of stars, with each star a little tiny fragment of half-digested corn dog or pretzel. It stank luridly inside the cockpit. Jebediah continued to pitch over, watching the ship's speed continue to pick up under the final orbital burn.

"More pitch over," Thaddeus warned.

Thaddeus, Cornelius, and Percival all watched with baited breath as the blue line that symbolized Celestia 1's trajectory slowly pulled around the curve of the planet. Only a few more seconds of burning and – they had it! They had a perapsis!

"You've got a perapsis, Flight Crew. Get ready to cut the engines on my mark."

The orbital vehicle's perapsis shot up rapidly. From only 4000 meters, it quickly hit 14,000, then 40,000. When it hit 70,000 Cornelius shouted into the radio.

"Cut the engines Celestia 1!"

Jebediah casually hit the kill switch and the ship suddenly stopped accelerating. All three were breathing hard and covered with sweat, while flecks of puke floating around the cabin hit them in the face and embedded into their hair.

"Apoapsis, 73,400 meters," Cornelius said with a shaking voice. "Perapsis 71,100 meters. You've achieved orbit. I repeat, you have orbit."

There was a reverent silence.

"Good," Percival finally said with a ragged voice. "Now get them the fuck home so we can throw them in prison for the rest of their lives."

"But sir, now that they're up there, shouldn't we at least give them a few go-arounds?" Thaddeus objected.

Cornelius added, "The books might not accept this as an orbital flight if they don't actually orbit."

"Shit. Fine, take them around twice and then bring them back."

Aboard Celestia 1, the crew broke out a few simple scientific experiments that had been provided for the mission. It was tricky work, drunk. Bill did most of it since he was too terrified to look out of the window. Jebediah stared as the planet rolled by underneath with an idiot grin plastered across his plastered face.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"Majestic," Bob added.

Bill said, "There's vomit in my test tube."

"It's just like the theory boys said!" Bob gushed. "Cold as fuck and almost total vacuum."

"We're giving you two orbits, then we're bringing you home," Percival announced over the comm. "I hope you like prison food, whoever you are."

The flight was a little less majestic with all the vomit hanging around. Back on the ground, Charlesworth finally burst into Mission Control.

"What the fucking fuck is going on!?" he screamed, grabbing Percival by the lapels of his suit. "Where the fucking fuck is my fucking spaceship!?"

Wordlessly, Percival pointed to the mission computer. Charlesworth dropped him and stared at the flight already in progress.

"Well I'll be goddamned," he mumbled. "Who are those guys?"

"We don't know, sir," Thaddeus offered.

"How the goddamn Hell do you not know!?" Charlesworth's eyes bugged out of his head. "Are you telling me that _you don't know_ who showed up in the middle of the night, stole our rocket, and flew it into orbit!?"

"That's, er, well…"

"You're fired! You're all fired! First thing tomorrow morning I'm going to _personally_ light each of you _on_ fire! But for now I need you to bring these Kerbals home."

Celestia 1's orbit held stable for its two revolutions around the planet Kerbin. Finally, it was time to bring the rogues home. The mysterious crew was directed to turn its ship around so that it faced retrograde, and they made a short burn to bring them back into the planet's atmosphere. Jebediah finally admitted they were too drunk for the tricky maneuver of aerobraking, so the ship was slowed on its rocket engine, which still had a generous amount of fuel remaining. They burned themselves down to a reasonable altitude and then detached the capsule, and the three floated gently down into the ocean on its parachutes.

The Kerbal Space Program hushed the entire thing up. No one was fired, no one went to prison, and the crew was each given a Kerbin Medal for Extreme Bravery. No amount of cleaning was able to get the smell of puke out of the command module, and the entire thing ended up having to be burned. Only a select few people knew that the entire launch was anything but planned. Bill, Bob, and Jebediah went down in history as the first Kerbals to achieve manned orbit. Their faces were plastered across scientific journals, textbooks, and commemorative plates. They went on to fly many more missions and the entire story went with them to the grave, known to no one. Except, of course, for the conspiracy theorists who guessed at some of the details of the unplanned but still glorious mission.

[Author:] Let me just remind you not to drink and drive. It makes for good comedy but bad citizenship.


End file.
